In the internet, internet users provide private information voluntarily to internet based service providers, such as MySpace, Facebook etc., to present themselves to the internet community or friends. These service providers may use this information to build up a social network on the internet. The service providers may use this information to customize some of their services, namely provide the user with information or offerings relating to his/her interests.
In detail, social networks are social structures, generally described using graphs, and used to represent how individuals are connected to each other. Each individual is represented with a node, and his/her relations with the other individuals are the ties among them. Each tie can represent many different types of relations like, friends, money, family, trade, etc.
Many content and communication services are based today on the idea of exploiting the information derived from the “Six degrees of separation” concept. This hypothesis refers to the idea that everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth. Hence, studies confirming it lead to the conclusion that the human society can be characterized by networks with short path lengths (small world phenomenon).
Social networking information (SNI) may be considered as data representing a structure of contacts and may normally be extracted out of network data. The type of networks used by internet services exploiting this concept are IP networks where the most likely services used are: web, email and chat. However, the network data used is the one generated when the user interacts with the service. In the case of Web traffic, the data is extracted from the logs the web server records. In the case of email, the logs used belong to the email server, and so on.
Popular internet services are taking advantage of extracting social network information out of their services to enrich the possibilities of interaction of their users. Further, they are also leveraging on the willingness of the users to make such information explicit to the services, in the so called ‘networking’ services.
In the example of the internet, users often provide the information by themselves according to their liking, which is thus only more or less reliable, and commonly also provide one or more contacts to the service provider.
Therefore, internet social networking services are based on explicit information provided by the end user, stating what their contacts in the network are.
However, from a telecommunication services point of view, telecom operators do not take advantage of this. Telecom operators are not extracting that information from their networks to make it available for the users, or even the services. Moreover, there exists no mechanism to engage in network data analysis with user explicit information on who are their peers, when they use communication services.
Further, there exists no mechanism defined to extract the relevant information out of a telecom network to build social networks from pure telecommunication services, such as voice calls, video calls, SMS, MMS and instant messaging.
Still further, the identity provided by members of an internet-based social network, e.g. when obtaining social networking information from online discussion services (IRC), cannot be compared to the relationships existing between subscribers of an access network and the telecom operator running that service. In the later, the real identity of the subscriber can be contrasted at any time and it is trusted, and even offered to third parties.
In user equipment, there exists the possibility to store call logs, but there is no possibility to process it to extract what is the structure of the owner's social network. That information is not even cross matched with the traditional address book application for that purposes, or with other internet services that share the same identity as the telecommunication provider's.
One existing service of a mobile telephone operator is to use special billing, when the mobile user is at a predefined home location. Here, the mobile user has to define in his contract which location, for example by ZIP code, should be considered his home location and is then billed at a different rate, for example a fixed line rate, when he is in the radio cell corresponding to his home location. However, this service also only uses pre-set information provided by the user.
Using not only the home location of a user, but also interactions between users should enable the provision of more valuable services to the user and enhance the attractiveness of using a telephone in a telephone network, instead of using the internet, for example.
As discussed above, telecom operators, however, have not taken advantage of the large amount of user information existing in a telephone network from the user's contacts so that social networking information has not been used for communication purposes.